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172 9 General Intelligence in the Everyday Human World

on the importance of vision processing for humanlike cognition. The key thing an AGI requires
to support humanlike “visual intelligence” is an environment containing a sufficiently robust
collection of materials that object and event recognition and identification become interesting
problems.

Audition is cognitively valuable for many reasons, one of which is that it gives a very rich
and precise method of sensing the world that is different from vision. The fact that humans can
display normal intelligence while totally blind or totally deaf is an indication that, in a sense,
vision and audition are redundant for understanding the everyday world. However, it may be
important that the brain has evolved to account for both of these senses, because this forced it
to account for the presence of two very rich and precise methods of sensing the world – which
may have forced it to develop more abstract representation mechanisms than would have been
necessary with only one such method.

Touch is a sense that is, in our view, generally badly underappreciated within the AI commu-
nity. In particular the cognitive robotics community seems to worry too little about the terribly
impoverished sense of touch possessed by most current robots (though fortunately there are
recent technologies that may help improve robots in this regard; see e.g. [Nan08]). Touch is how
the human infant learns to distinguish self from other, and in this way it is the most essential
sense for the establishment of an internal self-model. Touching others’ bodies is a key method
for developing a sense of the emotional reality and responsiveness of others, and is hence key to
the development of theory of mind and social understanding in humans. For this reason, among
others, human children lacking sufficient tactile stimulation will generally wind up badly im-
paired in multiple ways. A good-quality embodiment should supply an AI agent with a body
that possesses skin, which has varying levels of sensitivity on different parts of the skin (so that
it can effectively distinguish between reality and its perception thereof in a tactile context);
and also varying types of touch sensors (e.g. temperature versus friction), so that it experiences
textures as multidimensional entities.

Related to touch, kinesthesia refers to direct sensation of phenomena happening inside the
body. Rarely mentioned in AI, this sense seems quite critical to cognition, as it underpins many
of the analogies between self and other that guide cognition. Again, it’s not important that an
AGI’s virtual body have the same internal body parts as a human body. But it seems valuable
to have the AGI’s virtual body display some vaguely human-body-like properties, such as feeling
internal strain of various sorts after getting exercise, feeling discomfort in certain places when
running out of energy, feeling internally different when satisfied versus unsatisfied, etc.

Next, taste is a cognitively interesting sense in that it involves the interplay between the
internal and external world; it involves the evaluation of which entities from the external world
are worthy of placing inside the body. And smell is cognitively interesting in large part because
of its relationship with taste. A smell is, among other things, a long-distance indicator of what
a certain entity might taste like. So, the combination of taste and smell provides means for
conceptualizing relationships between self, world and distance.

9.6.2 The Human Body’s Multiple Intelligences

While most unique aspect of human intelligence is rooted in what one might call the "cognitive
cortex" – the portions of the brain dealing with self-reflection and abstract thought. But the
cognitive cortex does its work in close coordination with the body’s various more specialized

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